Fred fled to the Exchange.  The secretary was out, but his stenographer confirmed the circular.  Fred went back to his office to think things over.  Again he was tempted to repudiate the Brauer check at the bank and let Brauer do his worst.  But he drew back from such a course with his usual repugnance.  He saw now that all his high-flown theory about standing on his own feet was the merest sophistry.  So far, he was nothing but the product of Hilmer’s puzzling benevolence.  One jam in the wheel and everything halted.  He thought the whole matter out.  He was still what Hilmer had intimated on the night of that disturbing dinner party—­a creature with a back bent by continual bowing and scraping—­a full-grown man with standards inherited instead of acquired.  Why didn’t he go around to the office of Ford, Wetherbee & Co. and beat up his nasty little ex-partner?  Why didn’t he meet Kendrick’s gumshoe activities with equal stealth?  It should have been possible to snare Kendrick if one had the guts.  And why accept a gratuity from Hilmer in the shape of two thousand dollars more or less for commissions on business that one never really had earned the right to?  He began to suspect that Hilmer had instructed his cashier to pay the companies direct.  It was probably his patron’s way of forcing home the idea that the commissions were a gratuity.  No doubt even now he was chuckling at the spectacle of Starratt running about the street picking up the doles.  He decided, once and for all, that he wouldn’t go on being an object of satirical charity.  He wouldn’t refuse the Hilmer business, but he would put it on the proper basis.  He would put a proposition squarely up to Hilmer whereby Hilmer would become a definite partner in the firm—­Hilmer, Starratt & Co., to be exact.  This would mean not only an opportunity to handle all the Hilmer business itself, but to control other insurance that Hilmer had his finger in.  There would be no silent partners, no gratuitous assistance from either clients or wife, no evasions.  From this moment on everything was to be upon a frank and open basis.

He went out at once to see Hilmer.  His wife answered the door as she had done previously and he sat in the same seat he had occupied the night before.  He had a sense of intrusion—­he felt that he was being tolerated.  Helen had removed the bandage from her wrist and she looked very handsome in the half-light of a screened electric bulb.  He noticed that flowers had been placed in one of the vases on the mantelshelf and that the mandarin skirt clung a trifle less precisely to the polished surface of the oak piano.  A magazine sprawled face downward on the floor.  Already the impress of Mrs. Hilmer on the surroundings was becoming a trifle blurred.

He came at once to the point—­he had a business proposition to make to Hilmer and he wished to see him.

But Helen was not to be excluded from the secret of his mission that easily.  The doctor had denied anybody access to Hilmer; therefore, unless it was very urgent...